Yemen: HQ for rich man's jihad

The “poverty is the cause of terrorism” faction was up against it in 2009. Shirwa Ahmed left Minnesota to join the ranks of Somalia’s medieval al-Shabab, whose finances are better than those of the peasant infidels they burn alive. Earlier this year the FBI announced that Ahmed found his grim calling when he lived near the banks of the Mississipi River in a country where one hour sitting at a drive-thru window earns you seven double cheeseburgers. Then there was Major Nidal Hasan, who made good money – better than what any of the soldiers he killed made, anyway. And now there is Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Western-educated young man hailing from one of the Nigerian capital’s ritziest neighborhoods, who tries to kill himself and a couple hundred others on a plane headed to the land of opportunity.

My friend Chris Harnisch is perhaps the leading expert on Yemeni terrorism. He has written a piece on the increasing role of Yemen-based Islamists in global terrorism. Their influence has reached Ahmed, Hasan, Abdulmutallab, and many others, thanks to the power of ideology above all else. Here is an excerpt and link to his piece on al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The Christmas Day attempt is proof of AQAP’s desire and ability to strike America and American interests. The recent U.S. and Yemeni strikes on AQAP strongholds and leadership may have weakened the group, but its recent statements suggest that it is still operational and under strong leadership. AQAP reiterated its desire to strike the U.S. in its statement claiming responsibility for Abdulmutallab’s attempt: “From here, we say to the American people: since you support your leaders and you stand behind them in killing our women and our children, rejoice for what will do you harm. We have come to you with slaughter and we have prepared for you men who love death as you love life. With permission from Allah, we will come to you from where you do not expect. As you kill, you will be killed. Tomorrow is near.”[40] AQAP has made its intentions very clear: it is no longer satisfied with attacking Saudi and Yemeni targets; it has every intention to kill Americans.

A hard, job-friendly rain

I might have been more careful when I wished, almost two years ago, that the yawner “green” movement would end its addiction to renewable clichés, and pump some poetic depth into the enviro-jihad. I suggested tweaking Bob Dylan’s “It’s a Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall.” Last week I got what was coming to me: At Copenhagen’s “climate summit”– where guests required 1,200 limos, 140 private planes, and as much carbon as Kansas City, KS over 11 days – Al Gore smashed the meaningless “eco-friendly” rhetoric with a poem:

…Neptune’s bones dissolve
Snow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quickly…

Apparently the enviro-jihad’s poetry czars got my memo, almost verbatim:

Acid rain’s a-gonna fall, my blue-eyed son,

Rain’s a-gonna fall in winter instead of snow, my darling young one.

So now the “hard rain” crisis group has it all: a tragic premonition, a sympathetic international community, a promise of a “green jobs” recovery, and – at last – a poet.

One way to appreciate the disingenuous defense of this “slam dunk” case for government actions like “cap-and-trade” is to compare it to the “slam dunk” case for invading Iraq. Back in 2003, the premonition was vague: even President Bush didn’t say Saddam Hussein caused 9/11 (and there was no “science” to cling to, only a gray case for striking a WMD-craving chokepoint of the backward Arab world). The international community was profiting too much off of Iraqis’ misery to sympathize with an invasion. And while there was initial talk of oil revenues paying for the war, it soon became impossible to deny the American deaths and economic miscalculation.

But Iraq always had its poets. Whatever horrors Iraqis faced once the US invasion turned Iraq from a prison into a wilderness, few could help thinking of national poet Badir Shakir al-Sayyab’s promise of deliverance:

…I can almost hear Iraq gathering thunder

And storing up lightning in mountains and plains.

Ever since we were young, the sky was

Clouded in the winter,

And rain poured,

Yet every year when the earth bloomed we hungered.

Not a single year passed but Iraq had hunger…

The hard rain keeps falling on Iraq, and no one can refer to anything about the war as a “win-win.” Its defenders have not had the luxury of reciting poems at global lectures in Copenhagen where they can laugh and eat caviar. Everyone can see the price of their policies. Jon Stewart, therefore, criticized Douglas Feith (a DOD top-dog) a few years ago for underselling the dangers: “The fact that you seemed to know all the risks takes this from manslaughter to homicide.” Stewart is right: the administration should never have said “mission accomplished” and should have warned that it would be hard and long and deadly. But only a year into the war, “Is the sacrifice worth it?” was a question every supporter had to take seriously.

The Copenhageners, however, will never have to take that question seriously. The earth’s cycles will be too complex to allow us to diffinitively know whether cap-and-trade or a butterfly's flutter saved the polar bears. So too with the economy: President Obama can spend four years attributing our economic crisis to eight years of President Bush, and no one will be able to diffinitivly prove the green agenda's complicity. Thus, no need to admit that “going green” requires sacrifice.

The UN, for example, says climate change is the world’s top threat. But, they say, it’s “as much an opportunity as it is a threat, offering a chance to usher in a new age of green economics.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu says, “Virtually everyone that I know has gotten more alarmed in the last half a dozen years.” But how alarming can it be if it is the pretext for his $39 billion “clean energy projects” save-the-economy stimulus? Just last week Chu was in Wisconsin lecturing on the win-win green jobs revolution.

President Obama, too, makes the solution seem fun: “The nation that leads in the creation of a clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the 21st century global economy.” Cap-and-trade, he says, is “a jobs bill.”

The Islamic Republic’s Ayatollah Khomeini once told an economy critic, “we did not make the revolution to lower the price of watermelons.” The “green” debate would benefit from such candidness. Freakonomics author Steven Levitt, for example, asks why we are preparing to spend trillions for benefits 50 years out. He concludes that spraying light-reflecting sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere through a 25 click hose would be wiser than cap-and-trade (which will cost $822 billion, according to the CBO). And that is to assume a problem even exists: at Copenhagen, Gore’s “slam dunk” case for the probability of the north polar ice caps completely melting in 5 years was refuted by the very scientist he based his claim off of (the ice caps have expanded since 2006). Meanwhile, no one has been able to explain the current decade of cooling, nor the reason that in five of the past six ice ages, carbon levels were actually higher than they are now.

If global warming is worth taking seriously, solving it will be hard. When Gore talks about “a hard rain” in his bizarre poem, he’s saying it can be avoided. Yet Badir Shakir ended his poem at peace with irony: “Iraq will bloom with rain.” Unfortunately, he was right.

"They heard music in their villages for the first time"

Here is the latest on Rob and his platoon in the Taliban-infested Buji Bhast Pass.

3/4 Marines Face Two-front Engagement During Operation North Star
Story and photo by Cpl. Zachary Nola

FARAH PROVINCE, Afghanistan – At first glance, the area known as the Buji Bhast Pass in southern Afghanistan looks much like the rest of Farah province. Mountain peaks tower over vast desert valleys spotted with small adobe villages, herds of grazing animals and local farmers tilling their fields.

Whereas other areas in the region are proving relatively receptive to coalition forces, the pass and surrounding towns remain a haven for Taliban fighters.

Threats and kidnappings, made by armed enemy fighters in the dead of the night, have sent a wave of fear and compliance over local villagers. This forced obedience, coupled with a high number of Taliban fighters lurking in nearby mountains, has produced an area hazard to both coalition forces and local Afghans alike.

The danger was apparent when Marines and sailors from India Company, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, visited surrounding towns of the Buji Bhast Pass area as part of Operation North Star, Nov. 15-17.

The key to securing the pass, which serves as a line of communication between the populated areas of Delaram and Golestan, lies in securing the trust and assistance of the local villagers.

Before laying the foundation for a more permanent and healthier relationship with the villagers,
coalition forces must first earn the respect and influence of the towns' elders.

"The elders are key to holding any kind of relationship with the local populace," said 1st Lt. Scott Riley, 25, the executive officer for India Co. "They want to help the coalition forces. They want us there, and they make it well known, and the fact that the Taliban are still [in the area] really worries them."

The operation initiated such a plan on the first day by visiting the town of Gund, which lies on the pass' southern door step, but the town quickly proved to be unlike other provincial areas.

On past patrols, India Co. has often been greeted by the curious, but sociable farmer, or local children in search of gifts. Upon its arrival to Gund, the company was welcomed by Taliban gunfire from fighting positions in the surrounding mountains.

Undeterred by an enemy incapable of matching the Marines' firepower, the patrol continued with its mission, and attended a shura with the town's elders the following day.

The Taliban's fear of elders' power and influencing could encourage local Afghans to support the provisional government was evident shortly after the meeting had concluded.

Taliban small-arms fire from the surrounding hills again targeted the Marines in a futile attempt to harass and disrupt any progressive discourse between the Marines and their Afghan hosts.

"[The Taliban] responding to the shura in that matter. [By] shooting at us, they're just trying to reinforce their presence there to the locals. They wanted to let [the locals] know, 'Hey, we're still here, we see you talking to the coalition forces, and we don't like it,'" said Riley, a native of Wake Forest, N.C.

Taliban fighters increased their efforts to reinforce their influence over the region later in the day. This third attempt by insurgents targeted the Marines, using an improvised explosive device.

"We turned around to look at how beautiful the valley was up there with all the mountains, when we saw a huge plume of smoke and dirt shoot up. Then we waited and eventually heard the explosion," said 2nd Lt. Robert Fafinski, a platoon commander with India Co. "We were pretty sure somebody had died, and eventually we were able to learn from the locals that it was the IED emplacers."

The failed emplacement only strengthened the Marines' message that uninhibited Taliban movement and violence poses the same threat to local villagers as it does to coalition forces. As the operation moved to the nearby village of She Gosa Janobi, India Co. used the incident as an example of the Taliban's disregard for the safety of those Afghans living in the Buji Bhast area, and to promote coalition support of Afghan national security forces.

Another shura was held with the elders of She Gosa Janobi, while dismounted patrols through the town allowed the Marines to speak with villagers directly.

The Marines listened to local concerns about security, shared food with those in need, briefed local farmers and businessmen about new Afghan laws pertaining to agricultural fertilizer use, and dispersed hand-cranked radios.

"We were able to pass out a good number of [radios]," said Fafinski, from Chaska, Minn. "It was very rewarding for the Marines to see the joy on the Afghan faces, when they heard music in their villages for probably the first time ever."

In addition to playing music and the call for prayer, the radios will also help keep Afghans in the Buji Bhast area better informed about their role in safeguarding the local area.

No better friend

More and more Amercians - both liberals and conservatives - favor withdrawing military forces from Afghanistan. If we do withdraw them, we will also be withdrawing the most effective humanitarian force: the US Marine Corps. Here is an article on 2nd Lt Fafinski's platoon in Helmand. (Photos of his platoon by U.S. Marine Corps).

Marines save lives, assist Afghan National Army
11/5/2009 By Staff Sgt. Luis R. Agostini, Regimental Combat Team 7

FARAH PROVINCE, Afghanistan — As Seaman Jared D. Wilson, a corpsman with Company I, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment, stepped into his humvee on the morning of Nov. 2, he knew he very well could find himself in the position of saving lives.

He didn’t expect it to be Afghan lives.

On the evening of Nov. 1, the Marines of Company I, 3rd Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment were tasked with the security of a re-supply convoy the following morning for the Afghan National Army.

The Marines have been down this road before. Part of the route the Marines have taken from their forward operating base to their final destination has been identified as a Taliban hotspot.

“The last time we went down that route, we found three, 100-pound IEDs. It was kind of nerve-racking,” said Petty Officer 3rd Class Joshua J. Azarte, also a corpsman with Co. I, 3/4.

“That’s a bad place. We’re finding IEDs all of the time over there, and last time, we took indirect fire that came really close to our trucks,” said 2nd Lt. Robert R. Fafinski III, the commander of 1st Platoon, Co. I, 3/4.

After a two-hour delay waiting on the Afghan National Army right outside of the FOB, the convoy made its way to the Afghan Uniformed Police checkpoint, with Ford pick-up trucks of Afghan National Police and Afghan National Army soldiers integrated.

The Marines have learned to exercise patience and develop their mentoring skills with the Afghan forces. From departure times to picking up trash, the Marines are trying to lead by example when it comes to military discipline.

“We’re going to continue working with them. It looks like their heads are in the right place, they just need more mentoring,” said Lance Cpl. Jacob Fournier, a section leader with Co. I, 3/4.
Although labeled as a security mission, the Marines were looking to “get some.” Because of the previous attacks on the Marines in the same location, the Marines were hoping to draw fire from any enemy forces in the area and do what Marine “grunts” are known for: seek, close with and destroy the enemy.

About an hour into the convoy, a domino effect of red brake lights brought the convoy to a complete stop. An Afghan truck driver waved down the lead vehicle of the convoy, and through a Pashtu translator embedded with 1st platoon, informed the Marines of a nearby car accident.The Marines didn’t take any chances, keeping a strong sense of vigilance while investigating the scene.

“Myself and a bunch of the Marines approached the scene thinking it was an ambush. Within 30 seconds, we switched gears from expecting enemy contact to a lifesaving mission,” said Fafinski.
Wilson approached the scene, and immediately noticed signs of a potentially fatal car accident. A rear bumper, glass, windshield and a shoe was strewn throughout the road.

As the Marines and Afghan forces made their way off of the right side of the road, they immediately knew the accident was no ambush. An Afghan family of nine fell victim to an off-road accident. The injured Afghans lay near a totaled, white, hatchback vehicle. Two Afghans were pronounced dead on the scene. Although ruled a car accident, Fafinski believes the family may have been swerving, trying to avoid a possible IED. He believes this for good reason.

About two weeks ago, an Afghan family struck a Taliban-emplaced roadside bomb, killing one and wounding several others.

“They’re hitting their own people. Not only does it disgust me, it makes me want to get them a lot more,” Fafinski said. Wilson and Azarte immediately went to work, prioritizing their new patients for triage.

The “docs,” as the Marines refer to them, have completed extensive training and participated in numerous field exercises, including Mojave Viper. Mojave Viper is a 40-day field exercise at Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif., required for all Marine infantry battalions deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan. Part of the training includes mass casualty exercises, which Marines and corpsmen learn to work as a team to treat a multitude of simulated casualties.

But this time, it was for real.

Three of the injured passengers looked to just suffer cuts, bruises and shock. As they were identified, the corpsmen moved on to the more serious injuries.

The Afghan family was driving from Lashkar Gah to Afghanistan’s Nimroz province, to treat the grandmother for hypertension. She was now being treated for a severe foot injury, which at first glance, may have required amputation. The Marines, corpsmen and Afghan forces began working together in a concerted effort. The platoon sergeant, Staff Sgt. Paul V. Cooke, began coordinating a casualty evacuation for the injured Afghans requiring urgent care, while the rest of the Marines cordoned off the area.

The Afghan soldiers offered what help they could, from communicating with the family members able to speak, to providing security on the main road.
The corpsmen tended to the wounded, which included the grandmother, two boys and a young girl. While dealing with the wounded, the corpsmen kept the Afghan and Islamic code of conduct in mind.

“I asked the interpreter to ask permission from the son to treat the injured women,” said Wilson, a 21-year-old from San Dimas, Calif. “The son didn’t hesitate to allow us to treat them.”

Within 30 minutes, two UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters landed within the vicinity of where Sgt. Randolph J. Chatfield, a section leader with 1st platoon, popped yellow smoke.

The coalition of Marines, sailors and Afghans again worked in unison, loading the patients onto stretchers and transporting them from the accident site to the helicopters.

“They responded very well,” said Azarte, a 21-year-old from Tucson, Ariz.

“If we didn’t have the interpreter and the ANA, it would’ve been a lot harder to treat those people,” Wilson said.

“They showed genuine care. They were willing to do what they could, but comfortable enough to know that we had it in control,” said Cooke, a 31-year-old from Grant’s Pass, Ore.

The injured were taken to FOB Delaram, where they received treatment from the Army’s 67th Forward Surgical Team. From there, they were flown to an Afghan hospital in Kandahar, where they will receive CAT-scans for head trauma and any possible neck and spinal injuries.

As the helicopters departed with the Afghans, the Marines and Afghan forces pushed forward to complete their original mission, but not before being delayed again by several hours, due to a possible roadside bomb.

“I’d rather spend six hours finding out it’s not an IED, than .3 seconds finding out that it is,” Cooke said. The Marines completed the re-supply under the cover of darkness and with the use of night-vision goggles. After returning to the FOB, the Marines cleared their weapons, cleaned out the vehicles, and waited for the platoon leadership to give their intelligence debrief, which included praise heaped on the corpsmen.

“The corpsmen handled themselves well and took care of it pretty good,” said Chatfield, a 23-year-old from Kona, Hawaii.

“It’s Doc Wilson’s first deployment, but it looked like it was his fifth. That was his show,” said Fournier, a 21-year-old from Lanesboro, Minn.

“The corpsmen kept their cool really well. They had tactical patience, and dealt with a lot more than expected,” said Cooke.

“If this was a football game and we were giving out a game ball, I’d give it to the corpsmen and the platoon sergeant,” said Fafinski, a 24-year-old from Chaska, Minn. Fafinski mentioned Cooke due to his performance in coordinating the casualty evacuation.

“After it happened and we got back in the trucks, I had a deep feeling of confidence in our corpsmen. One of my lance corporals, Lance Cpl. Joel Fadden, looked at me and said, “it’s sure nice to know that the corpsmen know what they are doing.’ If he thinks like that, I’m sure all of the Marines are thinking it too.”

The best of all possible motives

In the ten days since Major Nidal Hasan yelled “Allah is great” and shot bullets into 43 people, Allah’s will has continued working in mysterious ways. Egyptian Muslims poured acid on and stabbed a Christian for entering a Muslim brothel. Forty Ugandan Muslims entered a Christian church and began beating parishioners with metal clubs. Two Pakistani Muslims exploded themselves to kill 18 kafirs. A New York Muslim tried to run over non-Muslims and told police “Muslims will fix this country.” Saudi Islamic law prescribed sixty lashes for a female TV anchor whose segment mentioned sex. A California Muslim at a mall yelled “Allah is power” and tore a crucifix from a fellow-shopper’s neck. And Filipino police found the sliced head of a local teacher who jihadists had kidnapped in October. Without the four FBI foils of Islamist terror attacks earlier this fall, the list might go on.

Walking back the cat, however, Allah’s will itself (i.e. everything that happens, according to Muslims) appears to submit occasionally to reason. In October, the United Nations focused not on fighting religious extremism but on criminalizing negative stereotypes of religions, such as, say, “religions are extreme.” Meanwhile, a Minnesota judge ruled that airport officers who took precautionary action against suspicious Muslims on a Minneapolis flight had to pay the Muslims for their mistake. They would not make that mistake again, and neither would the Army, with its UN-esque anti-stereotyping “equal opportunity” standards. No absurdity, then, that Hasan and his open Islamist sympathies would evade profiling and defamation.

Canadian writer Mark Steyn accuses multiculturalism and its requisite “warm and fluffy” feelings toward all things diverse of warping the West’s sense of proportion. But look deeper and you’ll find its frozen core. There is a cold detachment, for example, in The Nation columnist John Nichols’ question, “Was Major Hasan a cold, calculating Islamic extremist or a deeply troubled man who was about to be dispatched to a warzone…?” Who are we to insert our emotions and judge, he seems to ask? Nichols is like the critic in Voltaire’s satire Candide: “you were in the wrong to shed tears...The author does not understand a single word of Arabic, and yet the scene lies in Arabia.” The anti-Muslim idealogues do not understand a single word of the Quran, and yet they accuse Hasan of terrorism, goes the Nichols line.

Nichols warns us not to jump to conclusions: “There was clearly something wrong with this imperfect follower of Islam. But that does not mean that there is something wrong with Islam.” He jumps to the conclusion that “the incident inspired an all-too-predictable explosion of Islamophobia." But by his own multicultural logic, who is he to judge what constitutes an “imperfect follower”? What is moderate Islam? Can there be a moderate way to believe, as all Muslims do, that Muhammad is the infallible messenger of Allah? Can there be a moderate way to accept, as all Muslims do, the Quran’s opening line: “This Book is not to be doubted,” even while “this book” promotes misogyny, bigotry, and mutiliation? Can there be a moderate way to believe, as all Muslims do, that all happens according to Allah’s will?

Voltaire’s Candide asks similar questions when he realizes that the horrors of the real world differ from the theories and euphemisms of religious philosophers. After his friend is hung, his wife raped, and his life rotting away in slavery, he asks, “If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the rest?” And so if Islam is a religion of peace and moderation, what then are the religions of war? If Major Hasan is not a terrorist, who is? And if the majority of Muslims are moderate, what are the majority of Puritans and Evangelicals?

In the face of such cynical questions and aboard a ship fleeing persecution, Candide’s teacher lectures about his theoretical “best of all worlds.” “While he was proving this, a priori, the vessel foundered and all perished…” And so it is in America. While we prove that religion is inherently good and moderate, a US Army major in Texas kills Americans in the name of his religion. Was he simply “an unmarried loner,” columnist Errol Louis asks? Surely, but by no coincidence: it takes an extraordinary woman to wish to spend the rest of her life praying five times a day in Islamic uniform with a suicide-bombing enthusiast. Once again, in a religion in which finding a good, Allah-fearing woman is a jihad in itself, sexually frustrated violence is no abnormality.

The Council on American Islamic Relations was quicker to condemn the Islamophobes than future Major Hasans: “No religious or political ideology could ever justify or excuse such wanton and indiscriminate violence.” Can you be forced to praise Allah while your older brother is beheaded by the Somali al-shabab, and be content with CAIR’s detached judgment? Can you watch your mother be stoned before a Taliban tribunal, and be content with CAIR’s certainties? Can you be in the line of fire of a man yelling “Allah Ahkbar” and jump to this conclusion? The Islamophobes are right: the Quran is disturbing, and much of Islam is scary. If Islam is peace, then praise be to Allah: we’ll never see a religion of war.

Rob Deploys

Rob left the US yesterday to lead a Marine infantry rifle platoon into combat against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan. His instructors deemed him ready for a coveted early deployment slot. A couple of weeks ago, some of his Marine buddies from the Marine Corps’ Infantry Officer Course met The Great One With Talent On Loan From God, Rush Limbaugh, at a Washington Redskins football game. They had Rush call Rob in 29 Palms, California. Rush recounted the encounter on his radio show:

RUSH: “I was at the Redskins game yesterday. I ran into four of the most handsome, young, clean cut Marines who were just ready to get their orders, and they're heading to Afghanistan, some are heading to Camp Lejeune and these people all volunteered to defend and protect their country and this constitution. These, they're some of the greatest young men. They're 23 to 24 years old and they were up there as guests of Coach Zorn in his suite for the Rams Redskins game the other day. They had me, they got me on the phone with one of their buddies who was in 29 Palms, California who is being sent to Afghan-, to that, to southern Af, to a hell hole in southern Afghanistan…”

Then on the next day’s show:

RUSH: “I told you yesterday I was in Coach Zorn's suite at the Redskins-Rams on Sunday, and he had as his guests, he and his wife, Joy, four handsome, young Marines who were being deployed soon. They put a fifth buddy of theirs on the phone with me in 29 Palms, California. Some of them are going to the hellhole areas of Afghanistan; some of them are going to Camp Lejeune. These people volunteered. They're out there defending and protecting the US Constitution and this government and the people of this country. They're fighting for freedom.”

Most “policy analysts” these days will dare you to look them in the eye and say you honestly think we are “fighting for freedom” or “protecting the US Constitution” in Afghanistan, let alone Iraq. Christopher Hitchens recently took the dare in a speech on Islamist terror and free expression:

HITCHENS: “It is not an unfortunate thing, but rather a wonderful thing, that in our time too, we might be called upon to take a little risk to defend what is so absolutely and non-negotiably precious to us. Consider yourself lucky to be matched with this hour. Resolve, please, highly resolve, that you too will do your part to defend that Constitution and the values that it enshrines.”

Good for Rob for fighting for what many Americans blush to articulate. And good luck.

A Quick Look at Recent Headlines

News in recent weeks has left me unsettled. All of these recent developments deserve some treatment. But when the violations against (or proposal to violate) economic liberty, personal accountability, and the general good of the nation are as egregious and foolish as they have been lately, I'm left with little to say.

Making an argument against the state giving media/newspapers funding is about as exciting as explaining why telling the truth is an honest thing to do. There's really no argument to be made. But we'll break it down for you, with our exclusive Founders Porch take on the issues of late.

Healthcare: By my reckoning, it seems that Obama and his pawns are making the case that his plan (if it actually exists in writing) will reduce healthcare costs so much, so drastically in the long-run, making it a net-positive for the tax payer. This is pure speculation, an all-in bet that a government that fumbles the ball in taxes, bailouts, social welfare liabilities, wars, the postal service, (and pretty much everything else it makes a sad attempt to conquor) can finally get it right with healthcare.

Turning the charm-knob to 11, the Sugar-Daddy-in-Chief has gone on a primetime media blitz to drum up support for the healthcare overhaul. It seems that he has failed to gain traction of any note. It might help if he didn't repeat the same interview, with several different "journalists". In between spells of swooning and grovelling, these reporters managed to ask a few questions. However, it would appear they all got together an concluded that they should lob easy pitches throughout their interview.

That said, we are perpetually just and fair here on the Porch, so if you're going to watch Obama's primetime soap-box extravaganza, check out George Stephanopoulos' take. He actually included some substance in his interview, I'll give him the respect he deserves for that.

Personally, I'd rather bet on the Vikings to win a Superbowl than to assume that this time, just this once, the government can solve a problem properly. If history is indicative of future performance, I'll take my chances without the government's help. And they can stick their plan right up next to where their heads seem to be.

Acorn's Demise: Frankly, I wasn't suprised to hear that Acorn's minions had encouraged a couple (filming the catastrophoe, posing as a pimp and hooker) to import young girls from a foreign country for the purpose of human trafficking...and then use them as a tax write-off. And book the young mistress as an "entertainer" for tax purposes. Of course the best part of this video is that the ficticious pimp and his female associate didn't ask for suggestions on how to cheat. It was the default answer for Acorn's professional staff.

Oh yeah, and although it wasn't part of the formal Acorn counseling, their now infamous workers made sure to instruct the couple to "train the girls to keep their mouths shut". This tax scheme would make even world-class heavyweight title-holder in tax cheating Timmy Geitner blush. It should cost Obama some restless nights of sleep as well. The WSJ issued a report stating his ties go back 20 years with the organization. The radioactive fallout from the Acorn bomb will leave the Obama administration glowing a neon shade of green; they're knee deep in it.

In addition to the embarassment and hilarity, perhaps some substance will come from this series of events with Acorn. First, corruption and manipulation are no laughing matter, but they seem to be one of Acorn's main business opportunities. Now that they've been exposed, I hope there's more pressure than ever to review the rest of their practices. And second, Acorn has stated they are reconsidering voter-regristration efforts in upcoming elections. I am unsure as to what degree of voter-registration fraud they are responsible for in the past, but there is no doubt there will be less if Acorn abstains from their usual business.

CIA Witch Hunt: In a bold move, defying reasonable political action Atty. Gen. Eric Holder will continue to hunt down CIA operatives. Not for breaking the law or over-stepping their authority, but for being on the the current administration's naughty list. This is the stuff of "banana republic" totalitarian nightmares. Going after the previous administration with this legal vigor is a dangerous game. We should never tolerate the persecution of political enemies, liberal or conservative alike but with Obama's blessing, Holder will proceed. Where's Joe McCarthy when you need him? I say we should try some folks in Obama administration for being communist sympathizers. Sound outrageous? It is, but that's your attorney general at his finest.

Mass transit: "Every demon unleashed"

Ali G, Sacha Baron Cohen’s gangsta TV host persona, once posed an empirical counter-point to his anti-drug official guest: What about his mate Dangerous Dave, who took 22 Ecstasy pills in one night, and “found it difficult to get to sleep. But next day, he was really buzzin’, and the people on the Egham to Ruislip bus said he drove it better than he ever done before”?

Perhaps the DC metro employee that tested positive for drugs after being caught putting too many rail cars on a train found Ali G’s point convincing. Yet after a summer of embarrassments – including a June crash that killed nine, maintenance fatalities, subway suicides, and a growing budget deficit – the case for public rail-lines is becoming less convincing.

Ironies abound. As the economy collapsed, 9.3 billion stimulus dollars got earmarked for high speed transit. As its unemployment rate reaches 12.4% (second only to New York), Oregon blazes the “urban planning” trail. As the planet cools (since 1998), global warming remains a justification for mass transit. As people blame Detroit for failing to compete, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood promotes mass transit because, “it’s a way to get people out of their cars,” and the Energy Secretary Steven Chu says, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.” And as DC’s metro system unravels, Maryland hopes the federal government will pay half of the $1.5 billion construction cost for an addition to the system that would, it admits, run a deficit.

Public transportation has its place. Just as it’s pleasing to find a road at the end of your driveway, it’s satisfying to have a bus or subway at the end of your busy downtown block, even if these humble guarantees require the imperfections of government intervention. The New York subway and the Chicago “El” train may run deficits, but the population densities of these cities make it hard for even the government to mess up the service.

Yet in cities with smaller population densities, like DC and Minneapolis, the costs begin to outweigh the benefits. Urban rail proponents justify the fact that fares only cover a quarter of operating costs by saying it relieves traffic congestion. According to the Minnesota department of economic development, however, only 4.8% of Minneaopolis-area commuters use light rail, and most of them would otherwise swallow their pride and ride the bus, where riders are 25% poorer. The Arizona Transportation Research Cetner found that operating costs for one person to travel one mile are 6 cents on roads and $2.75 on light rail. Furthermore, Transportation expert David Hartgen, a professor at UNC-Charlotte, says that an interstate mile costs $10 million to construct, compared to a $20-30 million transit rail mile that transports 1/5 as many people. For the $300-400 million cost of the proposed commuter line to Big Lake, MN, he adds, you could fix every bottleneck in the metro area. The fact that light rail benefits mainly its passengers, while roadway expansions and traffic light coordination improvements benefit everyone relying on goods shipped on roads, magnifies the opportunity cost of light rail.

Urban mass transit proponents use “smart growth,” too, as a justification for their costly venture. They say that such systems keep people concentrated, reducing suburban development – an environmental threat. But less than 6% of the U.S. is currently considered urban. Also, by limiting suburban development (a dollar spent on urban transit is one that could have been spent on roads to suburbia), housing prices in the city soar and, as we’ve seen, burst.

Most importantly, roads are more conducive to liberty than mass transit. Unlike light rail, two lanes can take you anywhere. The car represents the social mobility that makes America great. Who is the federal government to socially engineer Americans away from it? One fifth of every federal gas tax (18.4 cents per gallon) increase goes to mass transit. If it let states decide for themselves how to spend this money, perhaps states like Minnesota would opt for, say, bridge repairs instead.

As the DC Metro Transit Authority reflects on its disastrous summer, it should consider spending less money on rail expansions and a hybrid bus fleet, and get back to basics. Just last Friday, after a Metro employee was hit by a train while working on the tracks, the Metro Board Chairman said, “At a time when I feel like the heavens have opened and every demon has been unleashed upon us, we have this budget.” Meanwhile, a D.C. councilman noted, “Every year we're writing a blank check and the program is expanding and expanding.” Like Ali G and his Dangerous Dave story, some would have us believe that spending billions of more dollars on mass transit will help cities function better than they "ever done before." Me thinks they need to read up.

A Simple Thought...

"You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for, another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that my dear friend, is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it."

- Adrian Rogers, 1931

Hedge Your Bets...or Dollars

Here is a great article with some sound wisdom (about which I will go into greater detail in my next post). It really gets some macroeconomic points out there correctly--which is sadly unusual these days. Pay particular attention to his points about the Fed and Treasury Dept.; it represents sound economic thinking.

I'm not a registered investment advisor, so I must disclose the onus is on you to do your research, etc. but it offers some practical ways to shore up against inflation (which I fully expect to be a rip-roaring problem within the next 12-18 months). I also really like gold and/or precious metals ETFs to hedge inflation. Check it out...

Factiva Dow Jones
OutFront
Inflation's Coming, Hide Here
690 words
7 September 2009
Forbes
FB
102
Volume 184 Issue 4
English
(c) 2009 Forbes Inc.

The rally has investors giddy with excitement. Frankly, I'm a bit baffled by it all. Everywhere I look I see ominous signs. Despite the slight downward tick in the unemployment rate in July, the employment ratio (full-time jobs as a fraction of the working age population) is 59%, lower than it has been since 1984. Real GDP in the second quarter was off 3.9% from a year earlier. Our financial system is still badly crippled. Commercial and residential real estate prices are off as much as 50% from their highs. It's ugly out there. That said, as a contrarian at heart I see great opportunities in this tough environment.

We are likely to run into a period of wild inflation, at least as bad as what we had from 1979 to 1981. At its worst, the Consumer Price Index was climbing at a 13% annual rate and long Treasurys yielded as much as 15%.

Why the dire outlook? Simply because our Treasury and its counterparts in other countries are printing money around the clock. They are also printing bonds, and with the same objective: reviving stagnant economies. The Keynesian belief that large fiscal stimulus is crucial to ending an economic downturn is prevalent among policymakers worldwide. No democratic government could stay in power these days if it didn't undertake countermeasures against unemployment, the possibility of deflation and the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. It is inevitable that all this stimulus will be followed at some point by a period of rapidly rising prices.

Central banks, including our not-so-omniscient Federal Reserve, will again fail to take the punch bowl away from the party soon enough, keeping stimulative polices going far past the point when unemployment has turned a corner and the financial debacle is behind us. Treasury Secretary Geithner and Fed boss Bernanke are trapped by politics and events. They make pronouncements downplaying the inflation threat, but inflation will hit like a tsunami within three years, maybe sooner.

What do you do to defend yourself? Buy stocks, buy real estate and sell bonds.

In the past stocks have provided a defense against not only inflation, but even hyperinflation. Reposition your portfolio with heavier weightings in oil, natural resources and cyclical stocks, while cutting back on utilities and consumer staples. Also, sell your long bonds and keep your fixed-income maturities short. Bond market crashes (like the one we had in the 1970s) can be as bad as stock market crashes.

If inflation hits hard, the chief culprit of the bear market--real estate--is likely to be one of the best investments in the years ahead. Buy a home if you don't already have one or a second home if you can afford one. Here are three stocks I like:

Apache (APA, 85) explores for oil and gas in the U.S. as well as in Argentina, Australia, Canada and Egypt. The stock has bounced back from a low of 51 in March but is still priced at not much above half its 2008 high. With the business cycle near a bottom and oil and gas exploration depressed for the past 18 months, Apache is on track for significant upside as demand increases again. Apache is priced at 8.5 times last 12 months' earnings and at 12.1 times the next 12 months' earnings.

Eaton Corp. (ETN, 54) makes highly engineered products for industrial, commercial, aerospace and automobile markets. Earnings are likely to be off sharply this year but should rebound as the economy improves. Eaton will cost you 20 times trailing earnings and yields 3.7%.

Wells Fargo (WFC, 26) is, with $1.3 trillion in assets, the nation's fourth-largest bank holding company. Earnings should move up sharply as it works through the large losses it inherited when it took over Wachovia. The stock trades at 16 times projected 2010 results.

David Dreman is chairman of Dreman Value Management of Jersey City, N.J. His latest book is Contrarian Investment Strategies: The Next Generation. Visit his homepage at www.forbes.com/dreman [http://www.forbes.com/dreman].

Document FB00000020090824e5970000q



© 2009 Factiva, Inc. All rights reserved.

Our non-issues this Sunday...

For all the excitement packed into Meet the Press's "Our issues this Sunday..." voiceover, what a letdown to find out that the issue last Sunday was not "issues" but "tone."

David Gregory: All right. But let’s talk about the tone of the
[healthcare] debate. There have been death threats against members of
Congress, there are Nazi references to members of Congress and to the president.
Here are some of the images. The president being called a Nazi, his reform
effort being called Nazi-like, referring to Nazi Germany, members of Congress
being called the same. And then there was this image this week outside of
Portsmouth, New Hampshire, a town hall event that the president had, this man
with a gun strapped to his leg held that sign, “It is time to water the tree of
liberty.” It was a reference to that famous Thomas Jefferson quote, “The tree of
liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and
tyrants.” That has become a motto for violence against the government. Timothy
McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, had that very quote on his shirt the day of
the bombing of the Murrah building when 168 people were killed.

Perhaps Gregory would do away with the global warming apostles' "get pollution down to zero" motto too. Because if carbon is a pollutant, then this has become a motto for violence against everyone. At least that's how Charles Manson saw it: "Why don’t you tell them what’s really going on? Why don’t you tell them the water’s so bad the fish can’t live in it? Why don’t you tell them that the polar caps are melting because they created so much heat with this machine? The truth is, simply, the planet earth is dying."

It has been startling for some to see the Commander-in-Chief painted like Heath Ledger's demented Joker in posters in Los Angeles. Others view the President's depiction as Hitler or as the Joker with perspective: same old hyperbolic politics as usual. This debate is new to Gregory, but some of us took it on a couple years ago.

Protest exhibit fails question: Is this art?
Pat Knapp, November 1, 2007

Try as they might with their rigid rubrics, the No Child Left Behind technocrats have yet to devise a plan to test young artistic talent. If government officials cannot agree on what the meaning of the word "is" is, surely they cannot judge the value of art. Judging what art is not is easier. Last week's vandal spray-paint exhibit on an Evansdale school - a "KKK" and a "go home" in 2-foot letters - was not art. It was "hate mongering," Waterloo Human Rights Commission Director David Meeks told the Waterloo Courier.

Perhaps if the Evansdale punks had painted a giant swastika made up of little George W. Bush faces, Meeks would have eagerly called this unlawfully hateful too. What a world of difference a consenting forum like Luther College makes. Preus Library, a building funded by Luther students' tuition, currently lends 36 square feet of wall space to such a swastika. This is part of a 27-piece agglomeration of conspiracy vim that the college calls an art exhibit.

Each piece of the traveling "We Protest: Iowa Speaks Out" exhibit, according to participating "artist" Pam Echeverria, protests the war in Iraq. "Not all art is pretty or neutral," said Gallery Coordinator David Kamm. "Much of it grapples with the most fundamental issues of life - in this case, what does it mean to live in a democracy with unprecedented political and military power?"Yes, while Michelangelo's pieta may not be neutral and Picasso's Guernica may not be pretty, both are art. But what to make of the "We Protest" piece with captions below Bush faces seething "hates gays," "hates black people," "hates Muslims" and "hates art" (ostensibly this "art")? "It's clever," wrote Rudyard Kipling, "but is it art?"

The National Endowment for the Arts grant for the tersely put "lighght" (that's the whole poem) prodded Americans to ask the same questions decades ago. Just as NEA life-support took the vanguardism out of the avant-garde, politics began taking the life out of art. "There is room only for the intense, changing, crude and immediate, which Alexis de Tocqueville warned us would be the character of democratic art," wrote Allan Bloom 20 years ago. "Hitler's image recurs frequently enough in exciting contexts to give one pause."

Many liberals promote art because its subjectivity breeds creativity. Yet the clear-cut "We Protest" message stifles interpretation. On Iraq, pro-war writers such as Christopher Hitchens sculpt colorfully reasoned arguments, while "We Protest" artists spill black-and-white emotion. One "We-Protest" piece is a mere answering machine labeled "Warrantless Wiretap." Another, "Fruits of War," depicts decapitated heads in place of Caravaggio's fruit. Yet another has President Bush painted like the Joker, carelessly juggling a burning globe. Goethe's Mephistopheles said "life is short and art is long." These short-sighted "artistic" protests aren't making life any longer for Iraqis.

So aside from bludgeoning the essential immortal quality of art, "We Protest" poses a problem for Meeks, who presides over a city containing many of the contributing "artists." As he may well know, a crucifix in a man's urine is NEA-sponsored art, but a Koran in a toilet is a hate crime. The virgin Mary covered in cow excrement ran in the New York Times, but the Danish Muhammad cartoons were too offensive. And now hate language a fraction of the size of the swastika decorating Preus has landed a few teens in more dung than the Times' Mary. Meeks might spare the we-protesters, but the test of time won't.

Family matters

There can’t be many Americans that still gaze with disbelief at gay pride parades and gay couples holding hands: embrace it or not, most would agree that "it's a free country." Incest, however, still rouses a reaction similar to the Butler in the movie "Clue" when the Cop concludes the same after inspecting a Billiard Room full of corpses: "I didn't know it was that free," quips the shocked Butler. The disbelief is well-founded, because America is not that free: every state criminalizes incest.

The annual Capital Pride parade on Pennsylvania Avenue last June attracted a couple hundred thousand enthusiasts. One sponsor was Southwest Airlines. “Thanks for being a great travel partner as we take exceptional pride in partnering with you!” says its “gay travel” website in a homoerotic pun. Another was the federally funded DC Metro Transit Authority, which would have been wiser to devote its resources that weekend to updating a rail system with glitches that would kill nine the following weekend. Whole Foods, Verizon, Bank of America, and Yuengling were also among the sponsors, because these days one must be red and orange and purple, as well as “green,” to turn a profit.

It is not yet profitable to sponsor Incest Pride parades, however. For men that wish to marry their mothers or their sisters, the taboos and bigotry that once plagued gays are all too – what’s the word? – familiar. Not content with the U.S. Supreme Court declaring sodomy a fundamental right, the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared gay marriage a fundamental right. But if you fool around with your consenting adult sister, Massachusetts will put you in prison for up to 20 years.

Incestuophobia (as I’ll coin it since I am pioneering a realm that gay activists don’t care to forge) has its defenses. Incest is unnatural and disgusting, the incestuophobes say. Promoting consensual adult incest would be a green light to nonconsensual incest with minors. And even if it wasn’t, incest is a danger to society since it breeds genetic disorders.

The gay movement never accepted the sick-and-unnatural line as credible. Arbitrary taboos, gay activists said, suppressed natural and beautiful urgings. “[G]ay people, fearful of harassment, violence and arrest, were often forced into the shadows,” Frank Rich wrote in The New York Times last June about 60s-era homosexuals. “If a homosexual character appeared in a movie, his life ended with either murder or suicide.” But now gays have Brokeback Mountain, while the incestuous are still stuck with the vague innuendoes of a 17 century suicide tale:

Hamlet: Come and sit down; you shall not budge; You go not till I set you up a glass Where you may see the inmost part of you.
Hamlet’s Mother: What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me? Help, help, Ho! [the incest activists cling to the sexual suggestions of “Ho!”].

As for the “green light” critique, that sounds like a right-wing argument against homosexuality: it’s a slippery slope to five year-old boys eloping. And regarding genetic disorders, they may be a setback for society, but what about AIDS? That anal sex is especially conducive to transmitting the virus is a fact that gay activists sidestep. If fighting AIDS required our cooperation rather than condemnation, why not cooperate on fighting inbreeding defects?

What should classical liberals make of this, aside from the hypocrisy of gay activists? They should maintain their sense of proportion. Perhaps adult siblings should be able to do as they please in the privacy of their homes, but they shouldn’t expect affirmation (government-sanctioned “public affirmation” was part of the Iowa Supreme Court’s pathetic justifications for fundementalizing gay marriage). Likewise, homosexual acts should be legal, but no need to join the parade. Homosexuality, like consensual incest, should not concern the Transportation Department.

Sexual freedom? Of course, this is America! Government praise for your “life style” choices? Of course not, this is America!

To get to conservatism’s heart, go to the kidneys

You hear a lot of “conservatives” diagnosing conservatism’s problems these days, and usually these apologists are the problem. Barry Goldwater objected to the burden of nice-guy proof that these people obsess over. He said conservatives are the more compassionate ones because they realize man is not just a material being, but a spiritual being that needs liberty and independence for his development: “the Conservative looks upon politics as the art of achieving the maximum amount of freedom for individuals that is consistent with the maintenance of the social order.”

But Goldwaterism, alas, is long gone. So when Wisconsin senator Herb Kohl defended the liberal Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, saying, “We want a nominee with a sense of compassion,” Republicans only contested compassion’s judicial relevance, and not the premise that a liberal nominee had more of it.

Conservative – i.e. originalist – justices have more empathy: they care much more about man’s spirit and constitutional democracy’s ability to maximize liberty, and they strive much harder to protect the constitution from the populist whims of the tyrannical majority. Empathy is upholding a constitutional yet flawed law, or striking down a reasonable but unconstitutional law, in order to prevent the greater abhorrence of unconstitutional despotism. At worst, originalism is less of an evil than the alternative of nonoriginalism, the “Imperial Judiciary” doctrine that begs Justice Scalia's question: “If the most solemnly and democratically adopted text of the Constitution and its Amendments can be ignored on the basis of current values, what possible basis could there be for enforced adherence to a legal decision of the Supreme Court?”

If the Senate Judiciary Committee really wanted to measure Sotomayor’s heart, they might start with kidneys. The Al Gore-sponsored National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 prohibits the commercial exchange of organs, citing the constitution’s “interstate commerce” clause as justification. The reasoning was that without this law, poor people would sell their kidneys to make money (the rebuttal is two-parts: One, so? Two, in a free organ market, would you settle for a poor man’s kidney anyway?). But with 13 Americans dying each day due to a shortage in organ donations, and with 80,000 condemned to sloshing their blood through a dialysis machine as they wait, it’s hard to make a case that this law has empathy on its side.

Fortunately, it does not have the constitution on its side either, thanks to the precedent the Court set on abortion. In debating the constitutionality of anti-abortion laws, the “pro-choice,” “personal liberty” rhetoric is a straw man: If it were really all about “penumbras” and “zones of privacy,” infanticide would be a fundamental right too (The real question is whether pre-viability fetuses are constitutionally-protected human beings). Regardless, the Court has dedicated cases like Griswold v. Connecticut, Roe v. Wade, and Planned Parenthood v. Casey to espousing the constitutional basis of “the right of privacy.” In Casey it poeticized, “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

Proving unconstitutional the federal law against profiting off of organ donations requires much less creativity. A “right of privacy” that trumps the federal government’s “interstate commerce” power simply must be shown to exist. Deciding what to do with your physical innards is a much clearer example of defining “one’s own concept of existence” than deciding whether to kill a fetus that is, to put it mildly, less you than your kidney. And while overruling the anti-abortion state laws required a complex argument of how the 14th amendment’s “due process” clause applied the 9th amendment protections to the states, the federal NOTA law is directly accountable for infringing on such protections.

Sotomayor called Roe v. Wade's abortion protections "settled law.” Would she have enough empathy to apply this precedent to a potential kidney case? Or would she adhere to precedent with as much loyalty as she has adhered to the Constitution?

Republicans say they cannot support a candidate picked for her empathy. Conservatives, however, wish she had more of it.

UFC 100

UFC 100 has one of the best lineups I've ever seen.

Here are my picks:

Lesnar beats Mir via TKO- Mir looks like he's in amazing shape if the weigh-in is any indication. His knockout of Noguiera makes him (Mir) tough to pick against. But, Lesnar beat the hell out of Mir last time, before Mir secured that amazing submission. Lesnar's had plenty of time to get his submission defense in order.

GSP beats Alves in a unanimous decision. You simply can't pick against GSP until he loses. And some experts think Alves has what it takes to dethrone the best pound-for-pound fighter. We'll see.

And, purely as a fan, I'm going to pick Dan Henderson to beat Michael Bisping.

Regardless, I'm really amped for UFC 100.

Free Healthcare Ain't Cheap

With talk of lavishly expensive healthcare reform beginning to percolate the headlines, the time for consideration is upon us. One of my goals here at the Founder’s Porch is to aid those poor souls caught reading this in confronting the issues that rise in everyday conversation about the news, politics, etc. And just what would you say to your neo-socialist co-worker who took the time to pull out their iPod ear-buds and stop sipping their overpriced latte to inform you that Sugar-Daddy-in-Chief Obama is going to save American healthcare?

Of course, they’re armed with a host of pithy pseudo-intellectual one-liners ripped from the likes of certified human wasteland Michael Moore and Keith Olbermann (who feels the need for a cigarette and some pillow-talk after any segment on his show featuring King Barack). Could you fire back? What you don’t know is that this marginally burnt out social parasite just lobbed you an easy pitch, right in the wheelhouse. Wouldn’t it feel good to crank one over the left-field wall? To silence your pretentious counterpart?

You could swing at this pitch several different ways. You could try explaining classical liberal political theory—steeped in rich philosophy, theoretical economics and a well-digested understanding of history—thus damning the notion of emptying the public coffers for the benefit of few and to the detriment of many. Unless those listening to you have read Hayek, Tocqueville, and hopefully Aristotle you’ll strike out looking. While you’re busy making the case, your counterpart will be fantasizing about owning a new Prius (but not to cruise for chicks, that’s done via bicycle bro).

There’s always the empirical proof that universal healthcare is a nightmare. You could cite any number of studies on the performance of government health programs in other countries (such as the authoritative work of Michael Tanner). The existing research varies in complexity and conclusion. But statistics are fickle things. They are also very boring things. Unless your audience consists of economists they’ll begin to glaze over thinking of more interesting things like self-flagellation. You’ll strike out swinging here when your counterpart insists they’ve read contradictory studies (translated as: “hey man, I saw ‘SiCKO’ and out system is like, messed up dude”) and subsequently ignore your points.

I don’t want to preclude the importance theoretical arguments or empirical studies, they are both formidable and insightful. However, neither is likely to get make solid contact with your average person (certainly not a leftist). To hit the home-run you need, let’s talk about something that most everyone can relate to; it’s concise and makes profoundly simple, logical sense.

The argument you should make is that free health care is outrageously very expensive in the long run. Of course, it’s easy to see the price to pay those who bear the heavy tax burdens. But it will make healthcare in general catastrophically more expensive, not just the taxes used to pay for it.

To make your point, simply draw a logical parallel. Ask the proverbial Obama disciple what they think about tuition inflation over the past several decades. In case they don’t know, inform them that college tuition has been rising much faster than inflation since the late 1950s. On average, tuition increases about 8% a year. It is consistently 2-3% higher than inflation rates (as measured by the Consumer Price Index). With those simple numbers in hand, they should affirm that “it’s like, a bummer man” that college is so pricey these days.

(Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics, Commonfund Insitute and http://www.finaid.org/savings/tuition-inflation.phtml)

Now, how did it get so pricey? simply explain that additional demand for a college is driving the steep climb in tuition, the cost to receive a college education. The price of a normal good increases as a result of an increase in demand or a decrease in supply (all else equal); that’s easy enough to understand, even for an amateur. The supply of tertiary education has been increasing, but not enough to meet the rising demand. There has been an explosion in the demand for college education. The percentage of students entering tertiary educational institutions is growing by leaps and bounds.

(Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, EarnedDegrees Conferred)

Then next step is to ascertain what is driving the increase in demand. The answer is very simple: government funding. Prior to the 1950s, government funding tertiary institutions was virtually non existent. It has since become wildly popular for politicians to endorse the notion that every child deserves a college education, regardless of the truth that some kids could be spending their time in better places. As is the way in politics, money seems to follow the populist impulse.

(Sources: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com, Federal Funding of Tertiary Education, 1900-2007; he graphs shown are exclusive Founder’s Porch content; the raw data was compiled by various institutions but the statistics, graphs, and analysis are solely my own.)

If given the additional means via grants, subsidized tuition, cheap student loans, etc. more students will go to college. Those on the margins (who otherwise might have gone to trade school or directly to work) are now given a new set of conditions to make their decision: one that favors going on to tertiary education.

So, you now agree with your new leftist friend on three things. First, college is too expensive. Second, it is over-demanded (most reasonable people will acknowledge that some kids are better off going to work rather than majoring in beer-bongology with a minor in female anatomy). And third, the government has been enabling those who might have otherwise chosen an alternative to now bid up the price of education.

The parallel to universal health care is evident. With every dollar the government spends to make health care “more affordable” it will stimulate an increase in demand. In likeness to those who would choose trade school or work rather than college if the incentives were different, so too will healthcare be accfected. That means that a young man with stomach pains today may hold out to go the emergency room until it’s obviously an urgent condition. In tomorrow’s “Obamacare” world, that same man has little reason to go to emergency room at the first twinge of pain in his gut. After all, it’s free so what’s the drawback?

Multiply the marginal decision of a single man over millions of people and you’ll see the same effect we have with the explosion in college tuition. Free healthcare will be bring burdensome costs to fruition, and we will all pay the price. But most everyone will be equal in the sharing of misery. And those bemoaning the current state of healthcare may have far more to cry about, but efficient and effective care will be little more than a memory.

The logic is clear, the parallels are palpable; anyone can see that the government interfering with education, healthcare, or whatever the topic-du-jour may be is an economic disaster.

Death to which dictator?

Year One debuted yesterday, a Judeo-Christian lore redux type-of-comedy. In one scene Jack Black eats the forbidden fruit and says "it's got sort of a knowledgey taste." In another Cain corrects his brother for saying “I’m called Able”: “You’re called ‘suck.’”

It’s not the first of its irreverent kind. The best is Monty Python's Life of Brian, with its garbled-message-from-on-high scene:

Man 1 (straining to hear Jesus): I think it was ‘blessed are the cheese-makers.’
Woman: What’s so special about the cheese-makers?
Man 2: Well obviously it’s not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.

With so funny a genre, what to make of its Islamic sister-niche's market failure? Year 622, The Life of Muhammad, Yousef Almighty, Samira and the Amazing Technicolor Hijab? Not so much.

Salman Rushdie didn’t get many laughs for his 1988 novel, The Satanic Verses. It explored the perhaps too-probable-to-be-funny suspicion, held by many Islam historians, that Muhammad garbled up his own divine messages, deeming passages “satanic” when they accidentally contradicted others. Mr. Khomeini - a pasty old man that far surpassed “Garrison” Keillor’s presumptuousness with his demand to be called Iran's "supreme" leader - put a “fatwa” on it. (Personally, I didn’t think the novel was that bad). The current leader of the sexually-repressed world, Mr. Khamene’i, renewed the fatwa (which had already put Rusdie into hiding for over a decade and incentivized the murder of one of his publicists) in 2005.

I preface Iran’s week of protests and Basij-led beatings this way to put it in perspective: for all the inspirational rallying, few are objecting to the dour theocratic premises that the regime built itself on. And for all the slick appearances in Iran – shiny cars, tight jeans, text messages, ballot boxes – it’s still incredibly backward. The comedic irony of stonings as family passtimes in Life of Brian might not translate into Farsi. And a Year One Iranian equivalent would never fly, probably not even with “the people” (i.e., Moussavi’s voters).

Vice President Biden said of the election, “we don’t have enough facts to make a firm judgment.” Here are some facts: Of the thousands of candidates for the presidency of a terrorist country that actively leads the world in killing Americans, 476 passed preliminary vetting (must be Muslim, can’t be a woman, must support the theocratic revolution). Of these, the Ayatollah granted only three the privilege of running against the incumbent Ahmadinejad, who had run a campaign of potato bribes and media censorship for much longer than his opponents, who only had three weeks to prove their bona fides on hanging minors in public, stoning women, and jailing teens for “printing lies” and “spreading propaganda against the system.” But reserve your judgment, because, as an op-ed in The Washington Post this week suggested, “the election results in Iran may reflect the will of the Iranian people.”

Free or fixed, the Ayatollah deemed their results “divine.” But contradicted by protests, he now reckons the “divine” results require an inquiry. Was his initial assessment a Satanic garbling? As Muhammad’s child-wife quipped when she observed him changing the divine rules to fit his polygamist inclinations, “I feel that your Lord hastens in fulfilling your wishes and desires.”

There are geo-political nuances to be balanced, and the President is handling them wisely. But this doesn’t excuse the American citizenry for falling for the rhetoric of “vigorous debate” (the White House) and “thrilling elections” (The Economist). We should condemn the fascist scheming in Iran for what it is.

This means tough love for the Moussavi supporters in Islamic green, too. I saw hundreds of them in person protesting outside the “Iranian interests section” at Pakistan’s embassy in DC last Wednesday, all chanting “death to the dictator.” "Which dictator?" I asked. Ahmadinejad. Khamene’i’s ownership of Iranians was too axiomatic to condemn. A band of ten blandly dressed men, women, and children on the other side of the street holding “Death to the Islamic Republic” signs impressed me more. They said they wanted secular democracy. Who are we to deny it by euphemizing the greens? These people had no use for “divine” signs (ayatollah is literally “sign of god”) or fatwas (except anti-Khamene’i fatwas, which are frustratingly missing from the discourse). As children of the oldest, most successful revolution still rolling, Americans should stand with these brave secular democrats.

Iranians know Khamene’i is an autocrat, but they also take pride in their modernity and farcical elections. Khamene’i outdid himself with the vote margin, and the Iranians are sorting out the humiliating truth. As a man privy to Muhammad’s trickery in The Satanic Verses says, “It’s one thing to be a smart bastard and have half-suspicions about funny business, but it’s quite another thing to find out that you’re right.” He realizes “there is no bitterness like that of a man who finds out he has been believing in a ghost.” Iranians would still rather believe in the “ghost” than swallow the bitter truth, but it’s becoming harder for them to deceive themselves. As they protest the straw-dictator - Ahmadinejad - our government is wise not to be seen “meddling” (as the Iranians did with our 1980 election by taking hostages, and as they do today in our Iraq efforts). But Americans themselves– the veteran revolutionaries – should meddle unapologetically for the faction of secular democracy: down with the real dictator.

Idealistic Solidarity: It’s so yesterday

Thomas Ricks’ recent book, The Gamble, on the US military’s “all in” crushing of al-Qaeda in Iraq captures the poetic absurdities of life there: A triumphant yet starving Iraqi Army in Basra last spring resorts to fishing with grenades due to logistic incompetence. A sheep smuggler, asked by an American officer why he smuggles sheep across the Syrian border, answers “Why did you put the Syrian border in the middle of my sheep?” And a Sunni calls Iraq’s 9-1-1 to report a Mahdi Army attack, only to catch a scolding: “The Mahdi Army are not terrorists like you,” said the dispatcher. “And how could you know that they are the Mahdi Army? Is it written on their foreheads?”

We have our own absurdities in Minnesota. Zacarias Moussaoui took flight lessons in Eagan, requesting to learn everything except how to land. A Minneapolis man left America to blow himself up in Somalia, where people supposedly blow themselves up because they don’t have what we have in America. And when passengers at the Minneapolis airport saw men of Muhammad Atta’s complexion making bizarre preflight demands and insisting on praying out loud, they called for help. The government eventually dispatched a response: the worried passengers would face humiliating charges for their Islamophobia. And how do you know they are terrorists? Is it written on their foreheads? Yes, we too have our dispatchers.

There’s a haunting wind blowing in this war against Islamists. You can hear it in what Norman Mailer called “the delicate filtered laughter of a pessimist who is reassured that things have turned out badly.” This wind heaves everything upside-down, so that it’s support for Israel and the Iraq war that comes to require the explaining. You can hear it in the howling applause that greeted candidate Biden in July 2007, just before the “surge” proved itself, when he pledged “not within the lifetime of anyone in this room will there be a unity government in Baghdad.”

And so it was that when the widows of Iraq needed cows last January, it was not the National Organization for Women (NOW) but the United States Marine Corps that provided them. NOW has no stake in this.

Fouad Ajami, enemy of Arab apartheid and supporter of the invasion and surge, describes America’s new Iraq policy: “we are not to embrace the Iraqis, and claim the victory we won there and the decent democratic example we implanted on so unpromising a soil.” Ideology, says Secretary of State Clinton, is “so yesterday.” So here is yet another absurdity of Iraq: only when the satanized Mr. Cheney departs does the US actually return to its “no friends, only interests” permafrost.

If only ideology were “so yesterday,” we could forgive Amnesty International and the Ron Paul libertarians for demanding that the US suspend military aid to Israel. But Islamism is yesterday-today-and-tomorrow, and it kills. To each its own: Five thousand dead and five hundred concubined in a two-day Afghan massacre; shooting of legs and follow-up beheadings of tourists in Egypt’s massacre; genocide for Islamist Sudan; a hundred thousand dead in Algeria’s Islamist civil war; daily stonings/honor killings/suicide bombings in Somalia/Saudi Arabia/Iraq; a hundred plus Jews blown up in Buenos Aires; hundreds of thousands of Iranians doing The Rahbar’s will shot down armed with Korans and keys (to paradise); tongues cut out from those who would call such a strategy absurd; and two soldiers shot-up in Arkansas while smoking cigarettes last Monday.

The winds of this war blew in India and Israel long before we claimed 9/11 as our own, and Islamic terrorists are the whole world’s nightmare. Yet some would have Israel fight its own war: we have our own interests, they have theirs. That attitude, as a weary Republican senator once said of Bush’s Iraq strategy, “is absurd. It may even be criminal.”

The Islamists forget that Americans can fight for an ideology too, and that they are recruiting more Americans for the cause of liberty than they are killing. They can be forgiven, for they hear we’ve “reset” foreign policy: if Pakistan, Somalia, and Indonesia fall into the horrors of Islamic law, America, with its humbled defense budget, will have to be okay with it, as if to say, "we have no stake in this." If terrorists win back Iraq, it will be vindication for those that called Bush’s war “criminal.” But until the military completely withdraws from Mr. Bush’s bidding, it would be a mistake to confuse our cows-for-widows idealism with France’s oil-for-food imperialism. There are still some in America that don’t need writings on the forehead to tell friend from foe.

Ignore Intellect, Embrace Ethnicity

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” – Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

All the headlines, commentary, and punditry surrounding the recent appointment of Judge Sonia Sotomayor has brought forth an important question for Americans to consider: what makes a good judge? And in this particular case, what matters more in considering the qualities of a judge: race/ethnicity or their abilities as a jurist concerning the highest law? With all due respect to Judge Sotomayor, neither race nor jurisprudence warrant a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

If there is reason to confirm Judge Sotomayor on the basis of her brilliant legal mind, it is going overlooked. The focus has almost entirely been centered on her ethnicity and background. This of course includes a quintessentially American story, replete with both warm fuzzy feelings and tear-jerking details. Most of the emphasis is on her race. The argument (articulated by both herself and her supporters) seems to be that she will be a better judge for America because she’s Latina.

So we can forget the importance of legal reasoning in favor of her background, her “compelling personal story”, and her brown-ness. Sound ridiculous? Well, it is. It reeks of prejudice and racial preference when put in plain terms. She’s a favorite of the President because of her ethnicity, there’s little argument about it.

The travesty here is that the great aim of liberty and justice is equality under the law. To the degree in which people are treated differentially under one law, there will be injustice. Giving preferential treatment based on race is no more honorable than the Jim Crowe laws decades ago. Racial preference by it’s very definition is the antithesis of equality under the law. Affirmative action, nominating judges based on race, and other prejudice sentiments make a mockery of equality under the law, just like “separate but equal” did in years past. Not only is Sotomayor’s nomination teeming with prejudice, much of her judicial thought is as well.

Sotomayor’s jurisprudence (or lack thereof) regarding Ricci v. DeStefano is appalling. In this case a test was administered to firefighters in New Haven, CT so to promote the highest scoring individuals. When the results came back, the high-scoring field was not sufficiently racially diverse so the city refused to certify the test (in essence, they threw the test out).

My legal reasoning indicates that the case should be overturned and the higher scoring firefighters given promotions based on the merits of their performance, not the color of their skin. But even if you don’t agree with that outright, a careful consideration is due to these firefighters given the complex legal issues at stake. That apparently was too much to ask from Sotomayor.

Without any diligent effort, Sotomayor neglected to provide opinion on the matter. Rather, she simply joined the other judges on her panel in issuing an “unpublished summary order”, a decision only intended to be used when a case is not of any substantial weight and no purpose could be served from serving an opinion. With grave Constitutional issues hanging in the balance, she punted the decision.

And this wasn’t the first time she had joined such a cavalier, unwarranted ruling. She used the same tactic in Didden v. The Village of Port Chester, a case in which a landowner had his property seized for refusing to comply with a politically powerful developer. The city exercised expanded power under the “Takings Clause” from the Kelo v. City of New London decision.

Kelo has been ridiculed as a gross violation of property rights by legal minds across the political spectrum. Many states subsequently passed laws forbidding the government from unwarranted seizure of property. Yet again, Sotomayor flippantly avoided weighty legal issues in the case and provided no comment. She simply felt the seizure of land was right and offered no legal opinion in justification.

There has also been some news of late concerning Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion in the Hayden v. Pataki case dealing with convicted felon’s voting. In her dissent she implies that felon’s are unjustly disenfranchised when not allowed to vote. Obama fancies empathy as a highlight on a judicial resume. So empathetic they believe convicted felons are disenfranchised? I digress.

In addition, Sotomayor—when given the opportunity—has failed to confront the delicate issue of the Second Amendment in any meaningful way. In the case U.S. v. Sanchez-Villar Sotomayor joined a decision that concluded "the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right." The case dealt with the State’s ability to ban private citizens from possessing weapons. Even if you’re not a card-carrying member of the NRA be aware: there is a host of legal tension around this issue. Does the Second Amendment apply only to the U.S. Congress? To the States? With bold contempt again, Sotomayor joined in the unsigned opinion (meaning the author of the opinion is ambiguous) thus in the Sanchez-Villar case. Apparently the complex legal issues and Constitutional severity weren’t enough to induce a response from Sotomayor.

Sotomayor will not make a suitable judge for the U.S. Supreme Court. She has been selected and supported thus far because of her race, an effort as incorrectly prejudice as it is unjust. Her affinity for avoiding difficult decisions is hardly becoming of a Supreme Court Justice and her demonstrable contempt for the Constitution is reason alone to oppose her nomination.

Since I don’t believe one race ought to be given preference over another, I’m left without reason to support this nominee. Our President can’t say the same, so what does that say about him?

“…one should hope that the men who head the state resemble the law, for the law does not punish because it is angry but because it is just” – Marcus Tullius Cicero